President Joe Biden on Sunday urged Americans to reject political violence and recommit to resolving their differences peacefully, saying the upcoming presidential election would be a “testing time” in the wake of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
In a prime-time address from the Oval Office, Biden said political passions can run high, but “we must never descend into violence.” The president said his party and Republicans can compete vigorously over differing policy visions, but must do so in a civil manner.
“We are all facing a difficult time as we approach the election,” Biden said. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence — for any violence. Ever. Period. No exceptions. We cannot allow this violence to become normalized.”
Biden delivered a six-minute speech in his third address to the nation since the Saturday night attack by a gunman that left Trump with a bloody ear, killed one rallygoer and seriously injured two others. His warning came hours after FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said agents have seen increasingly violent rhetoric online since the attack at Trump’s rally.
Since the shooting, the president and his team have been grappling with how to steer policy after the weekend attack that targeted the very person Biden is trying to defeat in the November election. Biden strongly condemned the attack but said he planned to continue pushing his campaign agenda and had “no doubt” Republicans would do the same when the Republican National Convention opens in Milwaukee on Monday.
He stressed that these disagreements must remain peaceful.
“We can do this,” Biden pleaded, asserting that the nation was founded on a democracy that gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force. Biden also warned that political tensions were being stoked by a balkanized media environment and exploited by America’s enemies.
“Here in America, we must break out of our silos, where we listen only to those with whom we agree, where misinformation is rampant, where foreign actors fan the flames of our division to shape outcomes consistent with their interests, not ours,” Biden said.
Earlier Sunday, Biden was briefed in the White House Situation Room and condemned the attempted assassination of Trump as “contrary to everything we stand for as a nation.” He said he was ordering an independent security investigation into how such an attack could have happened.
The president also said he had asked the Secret Service to review all security arrangements for the Republican convention. Hours later, Audrey Gibson-Cicchino, the Secret Service’s coordinator for the convention, said the weekend attack on Trump did not warrant any changes to the agency’s security plan for the event and that officials “are fully prepared.”
Biden promised a “thorough and swift” investigation and asked the public not to “make assumptions” about the shooter’s motives or affiliations.
The president said he and first lady Jill Biden were praying for the family of Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief who was shot and killed at Trump’s rally Saturday night in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“He was protecting his family from bullets,” Biden said. “God bless him.”
President Joe Biden made the remarks Sunday, a day after an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
The president also said he had a “brief but good conversation” with Trump in the hours after the shooting and was “sincerely grateful” that the former president “is doing well and recovering.”
Trump, who has called for national resilience since the shooting, posted on his social media account after Biden’s remarks: “LET’S UNITE AMERICA!”
Biden, who has focused on portraying Trump as a grave threat to democracy and the nation’s founding principles, temporarily paused such political messaging after Saturday night’s shooting. Shortly after Saturday night’s attack, Biden’s reelection campaign froze “all outbound communications” and worked to pull its television ads.
The president also postponed a planned trip to Texas on Monday, where he was scheduled to speak at the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. An NBC News interview between Biden and anchor Lester Holt will now take place at the White House, instead of in Texas as originally planned.
Biden’s campaign said that after the interview airs on NBC Monday night, the Democratic National Committee will “continue to draw the contrast” with Trump during the Republican convention. It’s not yet clear when campaign ads will resume.
Biden still plans to travel to Las Vegas, where he will attend a campaign event on Wednesday. Vice President Kamala Harris postponed her planned campaign trip to Florida on Tuesday, where she was scheduled to meet with Republican women.
Trump, meanwhile, arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday night for the Republican convention, where criticism of Biden and Democrats is sure to be scathing.
The weekend’s developments are just the latest upheaval in a campaign that has been extraordinarily eventful in recent weeks.
Biden’s faltering performance in the June 27 debate so frightened his own party that some of his top spokespeople and donors turned on him, and nearly 20 Democratic members of Congress called on the president to quit the race. Facing growing questions about his fitness for a second term, Biden and his top advisers have scrambled to salvage his campaign by adding events around the country and more aggressively criticizing Trump.
Saturday’s attack upended — at least temporarily — that counteroffensive. The campaign had hoped that Sunday’s Oval Office speech would allow Biden to further hammer home his case for unity while also demonstrating leadership that might calm nervous critics within his own party.
“We will debate and we will disagree, that will not change,” Biden said in his afternoon speech. “But we will not lose sight of who we are as Americans.”
The Secret Service rushed former President Donald Trump off stage after an apparent assassination attempt at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Biden linked Saturday’s shooting to other incidents of political violence, from the 2017 death of a counterprotester at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection by Trump supporters seeking to block certification of the Electoral College count.
Although investigators are still in the early stages of determining what happened and why, some Biden critics have criticized the president for telling donors in a private call Monday that “it’s time to put Trump in the target.”
A person familiar with the remarks said the president was trying to make the point that Trump had been able to get away with a light public schedule after last month’s debate while the president himself was under intense scrutiny. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations more freely.
In the call to donors, Biden said: “I have one job, and that is to defeat Donald Trump. … I am absolutely certain that I am the best person to do that.”
He continued: “Okay, we’re done talking about the debate. It’s time to put Trump on the spot. He’s gotten away with doing nothing for 10 days except driving around in his golf cart, bragging about scores he didn’t make. … Anyway, I’m not going to get into his golf game.”
